Once A Jock Always A Jock? A New Found Love for Ball Sports

This week the regular season starts for the San Francisco Giants!

What are the chances that we would get to do this yet again in October 2015?

Why have I gone back to my childhood fascination with ball sports? 

The answers are simple, but deserving of some explanation. 

Kids

That should say pretty much all of it.

The New Digital Reality Juxtaposed With The Healthy Essence Of Play And Kicking And Throwing A Ball Around

There is little question that the push and drive for young people to plug in to screen time and to lose hours of their lives to electronic devices is a major factor in my new found love as a parent for ball sports and simple play. What could be more natural and physical than kicking, throwing, catching, and batting a ball, in all their spherical shapes and sizes and different games? Ball play is a full on living experiment in pure perfect physics, and it is with out question a healthy escape from the digital madness that is making robots out of entire generations.

Stupid Sportball - Outrageous Salaries and Violent Videogames and Movie Commercials During Broadcasts 

There are things about sports that I still find aberrant, such as the fact that most owners of professional franchises are rich, white, and pricks. Or the crazy salaries. Or the militarization of society, the violent videogame and movie commercials that bombard the family during a sports broadcast, is there no understanding of the violation of family friendly culture such violence represents? How the commercials penetrate and negatively impact the healthy aspects of sports? Or how pathetic it is that during the playoffs they make everyone sing "God Bless America" during the 7th Inning Stretch instead of "Take Me Out To The Ballgame?"

Still, with all of this in mind I have been living a major resurgence in the last 5 years of the passion I had through much of my youth for sports.

As well, it makes it exciting to appreciate sports as a fan in Nor Cal because of the success of teams like the San Francisco Giants and the Golden State Warriors. I can't claim to be a long time fan of the Warriors but I have been watching them closely this year and they are good!

How it is that a kid who grew up a Dodgers fanatic in the 1970's would turn into an old man fan of the Giants is connected to my original authentic admiration of Willie Mays and Willie McCovey, and of my favorite outfielder when I was a kid, Dusty Baker. When Dusty Baker became a Giants manager it was possible for me to pay attention to Giants success, and root for the Giants.

Admittedly, I was on the fringes for the 2010 World Series, though I knew what it meant to have Edgar Rentaría drive the Giants through to the championship. It was having friends actually witness the Matt Cain perfect game in 2012 and tell me all about it after wards that made me focus on the Giants in a way that I had not been doing. I had been interested in their progress but I was working way too hard slaving away for no real reason to watch the games at that point. Being a fan of sports helped me reclaim time for my own life again. In 2013 I simply began to make time to be a Giants fan, watching games and reading about the team, even though their performance was not so good that year. Basically, my love for baseball began to explode as I began to play ball sports and get outside more and more with my daughter Kiara as she got big enough to play. So 2013 was a bit of a slow Giants year, but that did nothing to keep me from falling in love with the game again.

Then being a Giants fan in 2014 in a real day to day pitch by pitch manner was about as much fun with sports as I have ever had in my life.
 

I will never again work a job from which I cannot take a break in the summer to check out day games, at least once in a while. That will be one of my permanent measures of whether I am being abused in any employment that I might have in the future.

Taking in and learning of baseball in the Liga Mexicana del Pacífico took it even further. That baseball could be a public space that was family safe in the midst of all the convulsion in México took my love for the sport to a very serious place. It is a fun game, and even more so when it is played as a statement of regular people claiming their right to live regular lives. People in the USA know so little about México, and the brilliance of the Liga Mexicana del Pacífico is a prime example, so good, so fun, such an opportunity to understand how much we all have in common, and still totally unknown to most people in the USA. We went to games in Sinaloa and it was a blast.

Baseball and basketball are not the only sports I am having fun with. We did by the way have a great time with the World Cup again in 2014! What a gorgeous and strategic sport is futból!

So sports. Take it all with a great deal of skepticism, but love the play and the level of passion a young person can bring to their sport. Whether it be a ball and a field, roping up for a climb, mounting a bike for a ride, or putting on shoes to dance, it is all the most healthy place for any of us, and especially our children, to be putting time and energy.

Go Giants! Go Warriors!